Humanity has always invested heavily in any scheme
that offers escape from the body. And why not? Material reality
is such
a mess. Some of the earliest "religious" artefacts, such as
Neanderthal
ochre burials, already suggest a belief in immortality.

All modern (i.e. post-paleolithic) religions contain the "Gnostic
trace"
of distrust or even outright hostility to the body and the
"created"
world. Contemporary "primitive" tribes and even peasant-pagans
have a
concept of immortality and of going-outside-the-body (ec-stasy)
without
necessarily exhibiting any excessive
body-hatred. The Gnostic Trace accumulates very gradually (like
mercury
poisoning) till eventually it turns pathological. Gnostic
dualism
exemplifies the extreme position of this disgust by shifting all
value from body to "spirit". This idea characterizes
what we call "civilization".

A similar trajectory can be traced through the phenomenon of
"war". Hunter/gatherers practised (and still practise, as
amongst the Yanomamo) a kind of ritualized brawl (think of the
Plains Indian custom of "counting coup"). "Real" war is a
continuation of religion and economics (i.e. politics) by other
means, and thus only begins historically with the priestly
invention of "scarcity" in the Neolithic, and the emergence of a
"warrior caste". (I categorically reject the theory that "war"
is a prolongation of "hunting".)

WWII seems to have been the
last "real" war. Hyperreal war began in Vietnam, with the
involvement of television, and recently reached full obscene
revelation in the "Gulf War" of 1991. Hyperreal war is no longer
"economic", no longer "the health of the state". The Ritual
Brawl is voluntary and hon-hierarchic (war chiefs are always
temporary); real war is compulsory and hierarchic; hyperreal war
is imagistic and psychologically interiorized ("Pure War"). In
the first the body is risked; in the second, the body is
sacrificed; in the third, the body has disappeared. (See P.
Clastres on War, in Archaeology of Violence.)

Modern science also incorporates an anti-materialist bias, the
dialectical outcome of its war against Religion: -- it has in
some sense become Religion. Science as knowledge of
material reality paradoxically decomposes the materiality of the
real.

Science has always been a species of priestcraft, a branch of
cosmology; and an ideology, a justification of "the way things
are." The deconstruction of the "real" in post-classical physics
mirrors the vacuum of irreality which constitutes "the state".
Once the image of Heaven on Earth, the state now consists of no
more than the management of images. It is no longer a "force"
but a disembodied patterning of information. But just as
Babylonian cosmology justified Babylonian power, so too does the
"finality" of modern science serve the ends of the Terminal
State, the post-nuclear state, the "information state". Or so
the New Paradigm would have it. And "everyone" accepts the
axiomatic premisses of the new paradigm.

The new paradigm is
very spiritual. Even the New Age with its gnostic tendencies
embraces the New Science and its increasing etherealization as a
source of proof-texts for its spiritualist world view.
Meditation and cybernetics go hand in hand. Of course the
"information state" somehow requires the support of a police
force and prison system that would have stunned Nebuchadnezzar
and reduced all the priests of Moloch to paroxysms of awe. And
"modern science" still can't weasel out of its complicity in the
very-nearly-successful "conquest of Nature". Civilization's
greatest triumph over the body. But who cares? It's all
"relative" isn't it? I guess we'll just have to "evolve" beyond
the body. Maybe we can do it in a "quantum leap."

Meanwhile the excessive mediation of the Social, which is
carried out through the machinery of the Media, increases the
intensity of our alienation from the body by fixating the flow of
attention on information rather than direct experience.
In this sense the Media serves a religious or priestly role,
appearing to offer us a way out of the body by re-defining spirit
as information. The essence of information is the Image, the
sacral and iconic data-complex which usurps the primacy of the
"material bodily principle" as the vehicle of incarnation,
replacing it with a fleshless ecstasis beyond corruption.
Consciousness becomes something which can be "down-loaded",
excized from the matrix of animality and immortalized as
information. No longer "ghost-in-the-machine", but
machine-as-ghost, machine as Holy Ghost, ultimate mediator, which
will translate us from our mayfly-corpses to a pleroma of
Light. Virtual Reality as CyberGnosis. Jack in, leave Mother
Earth behind forever.

All science proposes a paradigmatic universalism: -- as in
science, so in the social. Classical physics played midwife to
Capitalism, Communism, Fascism and other Modern ideologies.
Post-classical science also proposes a set of ideas meant to be
applied to the social: Relativity, Quantum "unreality",
cybernetics, information theory, etc. With some exceptions, the
post-classical tendency is towards ever greater etherealization.
Some proponents of Black Hole theory, for example, talk like pure
Pauline theologians, while some of the information theorists are
beginning to sound like virtual Manichaeans. (1)

On the level of the social these paradigms give rise to a
rhetoric of bodylessness quite worthy of a third century desert
monk or a 17th century New England Puritan -- but expressed in a
language of post-Industrial post-Modern feel-good consumer
frenzy. Our every conversation is infected with certain
paradigmatic assumptions which are really no more than bald
assertions, but which we take for the very fabric or
urgrund of Reality itself. For instance, since we now
assume that computers represent a real step toward
"artificial intelligence", we also assume that buying a computer
makes us more intelligent. In my own field I've met dozens of
writers who sincerely believe that owning a PC has made them
better (not "more efficient", but better) writers. This
is amusing; -- but the same feeling about computers when
applied to a trillion dollar military budget, churns out Star
Wars, killer robots, etc. (See Manuel de Landa's War in the Age
of Intelligent Machines on AI in modern weaponry).

An important part of this rhetoric involves the concept of an
"information economy". The post-Industrial world is now thought
to be giving birth to this new economy. One of the clearest
examples of the concept can be found in a recent book by a man
who is a Libertarian, the Bishop of a Gnostic Dualist Church in
California, and a learned and respected writer for Gnosis
magazine:

The industry of the past phase of civilization
(sometimes called "low technology") was big industry, and bigness
always implies oppressiveness. The new high technology, however,
is not big in the same way. While the old technology produced
and distributed material resources, the new technology produces
and disseminates information. The resources marketed in high
technology are less about matter and more about mind. Under the
impact of high technology, the world is moving increasingly from
a physical economy into what might be called a "metaphysical
economy." We are in the process of recognizing that
consciousness rather than raw materials or physical resources
constitutes wealth. (2)

Modern neo-Gnosticism usually plays down the old Manichaean
attack on the body for a gentler greener rhetoric. Bishop
Hoeller for instance stresses the importance of ecology and
environment (because we don't want to "foul our nest", the Earth)
-- but in his chapter on Native American spirituality he implies
that a cult of the Earth is clearly inferior to the pure Gnostic
spirit of bodylessness:

But we must not forget that the nest is not the same
as the bird. The exoteric and esoteric traditions declare that
earth is not the only home for human beings, that we did not grow
like weeds from the soil. While our bodies indeed may have
originated on this earth, our inner essence did not. To think
otherwise puts us outside of all of the known spiritual
traditions and separates us from the wisdom of the seers and
sages of every age. Though wise in their own ways, Native
Americans have small connection with this rich spiritual
heritage. (3)

In such terms, (the body = the "savage"), the Bishop's hatred and
disdain for the flesh illuminate every page of his book. In his
enthusiasm for a truly religious economy, he forgets that one
cannot eat "information". "Real wealth" can never become
immaterial until humanity achieves the final etherealization of
downloaded consciousness. Information in the form of culture can
be called wealth metaphorically because it is useful and
desirable -- but it can never be wealth in precisely the same
basic way that oysters and cream, or wheat and water, are wealth
in themselves.

Information is always only information
about some thing. Like money, information is not the thing
itself. Over time we can come to think of money as wealth (as in
a delightful Taoist ritual which refers to "Water and Money" as
the two most vital principles in the universe), but in truth this
is sloppy abstract thinking. It has allowed its focus of
attention to wander from the bun to the penny which symbolizes
the bun. (4)

In effect we've had an "information economy" ever since we
invented money. But we still haven't learned to digest copper.
The Aesopian crudity of these truisms embarrasses me, but I must
perforce play the stupid lazy yokel plowing a crooked furrow when
all the straight thinkers around me appear to be hallucinating.
Americans and other "First World" types seem particularly
susceptible to the rhetoric of a "metaphysical economy" because
we can no longer see (or feel or smell) around us very much
evidence of a physical world.

Our architecture has become
symbolic, we have enclosed ourselves in the manifestations of
abstract thought (cars, apartments, offices, schools), we work at
"service" or information-related jobs, helping in our little way
to move disembodied symbols of wealth around an abstract grid of
Capital, and we spend our leisure largely engrossed in Media
rather than in direct experience of material reality. The
material world for us has come to symbolize catastrophe,
as in our amazingly hysterical reaction to storms and hurricanes
(proof that we've failed to "conquer Nature" entirely), or our
neo-Puritan fear of sexual otherness, or our taste for bland and
denatured (almost abstract) food.

And yet, this "First World"
economy is not self-sufficient. It depends for its position (top
of the pyramid) on a vast substructure of old-fashioned material
production. Mexican farm-workers grow and package all that
"Natural" food for us so we can devote our time to stocks,
insurance, law, computers, video games. Peons in Taiwan make
silicon chips for our PCs. Towel-heads in the Middle East suffer
and die for our sins. Life? Oh, our servants do that for us.
We have no life, only "lifestyle" -- an abstraction of life,
based on the sacred symbolism of the Commodity, mediated by the
priesthood of the stars, those "larger than life" abstractions
who rule our values and people our dreams -- the mediarchetypes;
or perhaps mediarchs would be a better term.

Of course this Baudrillardian dystopia doesn't really exist --
yet. (5)
It's surprising hovever to note how many social radicals consider
it a desirable goal, at least as long as it's called the
"Information Revolution" or something equally inspiring.
Leftists talk about seizing the means of information-production
from the data-monopolists. (6) In truth, information is everywhere
-- even atom bombs can be constructed on plans available in
public libraries. As Noam Chomsky points out, one can always
access information -- provided one has a private income and a
fanaticism bordering on insanity.

Universities and "think tanks"
make pathetic attempts to monopolize information -- they too are
dazzled by the notion of an information economy -- but their
conspiracies are laughable.
Information may not always be "free", but there's a great deal
more of it available than any one person could ever possibly use.
Books on every conceivable subject can actually still be found
through inter-library loan. (7)
Meanwhile someone still has to grow pears and cobble shoes. Or,
even if these "industries" can be completely mechanized, someone
still has to eat pears and wear shoes. The body is still the
basis of wealth. The idea of Images as wealth is a "spectacular
delusion".

Even a radical critique of "information" can still give rise to
an over-valuation of abstraction and data. In a "pro-situ" zine
from England called NO, the following message was scrawled
messily across the back cover of a recent issue:

As you read these words, the Information Age explodes
. . . inside and around you -- with the Misinformation Missiles
and Propaganda bombs of outright Information Warfare.
Traditionally, war has been fought for territory/economic gain.
Information Wars are fought for the acquisition of territory
indigenous to the Information Age, i.e. the human mind itself.

. . . . In particular, it is the faculty of the imagination that
is under the direct threat of extinction from the onslaughts of
multi-media overload . . . . DANGER -- YOUR IMAGINATION MAY NOT
BE YOUR OWN . . . . As a culture sophisticates, it deepens its
reliance on its images, icons and symbols as a way of defining
itself and communicating with other cultures. As the
accumulating mix of a culture's images floats around in its
collective psyche, certain isomorphic icons coalesce to produce
and to project an "illusion" of reality. Fads, fashions,
artistic trends. U KNOW THE SCORE.

"I can take their images for
reality because I believe in the reality of their images (their
image of reality)." WHOEVER CONTROLS THE METAPHOR GOVERNS THE
MIND. The conditions of total saturation are slowly being
realized -- a creeping paralysis -- from the trivialisation of
special/technical knowledge to the specialization of trivia. The
INFORMATION WAR is a war we cannot afford to lose. The result is
unimaginable. (8)

I find myself very much in sympathy with the author's critique of
media here, yet I also feel that a demonization of "information"
has been proposed which consists of nothing more than the
mirror-image of information-as-salvation. Again Baudrillard's
vision of the Commtech Universe is evoked, but this time as Hell
rather than as the Gnostic Hereafter. Bishop Hoeller wants
everybody jacked-in and down-loaded -- the anonymous
post-situationist ranter wants you to smash your telly -- but
both of them believe in the mystic power of information. One
proposes the pax technologica, the other declares "war". Both
exude a kind of manichaean view of Good and Evil, but can't agree
on which is which.

The critical theorist swims in a sea of facts. We like to
imagine it also as our maquis , with ourselves as the
"guerilla ontologists" of its datascape. Since the 19th century
the ever-mutating "social Sciences" have unearthed a vast hoard
of information on everything from shamanism to semiotics. Each
"discovery" feeds back into "social science" and changes it. We
drift. We fish for poetic facts, data which will
intensify and mutate our experience of the real. We invent new
hybrid "sciences" as tools for this process: ethnopharmacology,
ethnohistory, cognitive studies, history of ideas, subjective
anthropology (anthropological poetics or ethno-poetics), "dada
epistemology", etc.

We look on all this knowledge not as "good"
in itself, but valuable only inasmuch as it helps us to seize or
to construct our own happiness. In this sense we do know of
"information as wealth"; nevertheless we continue to desire
wealth itself and not merely its abstract representation as
information. At the same time we also know of "information as
war" (9) ; nevertheless, we have not decided to embrace ignorance
just because "facts" can be used like a poison gas. Ignorance is
not even an adequate defense, much less a useful weapon in this
war. We attempt neither to fetishize nor demonize "information".
Instead we try to establish a set of values by which information
can be measured and assessed. Our standard in this process can
only be the body.

According to certain mystics, spirit and body are "one".
Certainly spirit has lost its ontological solidity (since
Nietzsche, anyway), while body's claim to "reality" has been
undermined by modern science to the point of vanishing in a cloud
of "pure energy". So why not assume that spirit and body are
one, after all, and that they are twin (or dyadic) aspects of the
same underlying and inexpressible real? No body without spirit,
no spirit without body. The Gnostic Dualists are wrong, as are
the vulgar "dialectical materialists". Body and spirit together
make life. If either pole is missing, the result is
death..

This constitutes a fairly simple set of values,
assuming we prefer life to death. Obviously I'm avoiding any
strict definitions of either body or spirit. I'm speaking of
"empirical" everyday experiences. We experience "spirit" when we
dream or create; we experience "body" when we eat or shit (or
maybe vice versa); we experience both at once when we make love.
I'm not proposing metaphysical categories here. We're still
drifting and these are ad-hoc points of reference, nothing
more. We needn't be mystics to propose this version of "one
reality". We need only point out that no other reality
has yet appeared within the context of our knowable experience.
For all practical purposes, the "world" is "one". (10)

Historically however, the "body" half of this unity has always
received the insults, bad press, scriptural condemnation, and
economic persecution of the "spirit"-half. The self-appointed
representatives of the spirit have called almost all the tunes in
known history, leaving the body only a pre-history of primitive
disappearance, and a few spasms of failed insurrectionary
futility. Spirit has ruled -- hence we scarcely even know how
to speak the language of the body.

When we use the word
"information" we reify it because we have always reified
abstractions -- ever since God appeared as a burning bush.
(Information as the catastrophic decorporealization of "brute"
matter). We would now like to propose the identification of self
with body. We're not denying that "the body is also spirit", but
we wish to restore some balance to the historical equation. We
calculate all body-hatred and world-slander as our "evil". We
insist on the revival (and mutation) of "pagan" values concerning
the relation of body and spirit. We fail to feel any great
enthusiasm for the "information economy" because we see it as yet
another mask for body-hatred. We can't quite believe in the
"information war", since it also hypostatizes information
but labels it "evil".

In this sense, "information" would appear to be neutral.
But we also distrust this third position as a lukewarm cop-out
and a failure of theoretical vision. Every "fact" takes
different meanings as we run it through our dialectical
prism (11) and study its gleam and shadows. The "fact" is never
inert or "neutral", but it can be both "good" and "evil" (or
beyond them) in countless variations and combinations.

We,
finally, are the artists of this immeasurable discourse. We create values. We do this because we are alive. Information is
as big a "mess" as the material world it reflects and transforms.
We embrace the mess, all of it. It's all life. But within the
vast chaos of the alive, certain information and certain
material things begin to coalesce into a poetics or a
way-of-knowing or a way-of-acting. We can draw certain pro-tem
"conclusions," as long as we don't plaster them over and set them
up on altars.

Neither "information" nor indeed any one "fact" constitutes a
thing-in-itself. The very word "information" implies an
ideology, or rather a paradigm, rooted in unconscious fear of the
"silence" of matter and of the universe. "Information" is a
substitute for certainty, a left-over fetish of dogmatics,
a super-stitio , a spook. "Poetic facts" are not
assimilable to the doctrine of "information". "Knowledge is
freedom" is true only when freedom is understood as a
psycho-kinetic skill. "Information" is a chaos; knowledge
is the spontaneous ordering of that chaos; freedom is the surfing
of the wave of that spontaneity.

These tentative conclusions constitute the shifting and marshy
ground of our "theory". The TAZ wants all information and all
bodily pleasure in a great complex confusion of sweet data and
sweet dates -- facts and feasts -- wisdom and wealth. This is
our economy -- and our war.

NOTES

1) The new "life" sciences offer some dialectical opposition here,
or could do so if they worked and through certain paradigms.
Chaos theory seems to deal with the material world in positive
ways, as does Gaia theory, morphogenetic theory, and various
other "soft" and "neo-hermetic" disciplines. Elsewhere I've
attempted to incorporate these philosophical implications into a
"festal" synthesis. The point is not to abandon all thought
about the material world, but to realize that all science
has philosophical and political implications, and that science is
a way of thinking, not a dogmatic structure of incontrovertible
Truth. Of course quantum, relativity, and information theory are
all "true" in some way and can be given a positive
interpretation. I've already done that in several essays. Now I
want to explore the negative aspects.

4) Like Pavlov's dogs salivating at the dinner bell rather than the
dinner: -- a perfect illustration of what I mean by
"abstraction".

5) Altho some might say that it already "virtually" exists. I just
heard from a friend in California of a new scheme for "universal
prisons": -- offenders will be allowed to live at home and go
to work but will be electronically monitored at all times,
like Winston Smith in 1984. The universal panopticon now
potentially coincide one-to-one with the whole of reality; life
and work will take the place of outdated physical incarceration:
-- the Prison Society will merge with "electronic democracy" to
form a Surveillance State or information totality,
with all time and space compacted beneath the unsleeping gaze of
RoboCop. On the level of pure tech, at least, it would seem that
we have at last arrived at "the future". "Honest citizens" of
course will have nothing to fear; hence terror will reign
unchallenged and Order will triumph like the Universal Ice. Our
only hope may lie in the "chaotic perturbation" of
massively-linked computers, and in the venal stupidity or boredom
of those who program and monitor the system.

6) I will always remember with pleasure being addressed, by a
Bulgarian delegate to a conference I once attended, as a "fellow
worker in philosophy". Perhaps the capitalist version would be
"entrepreneur in philosophy", as if one bought ideas like apples
at roadside stands.

7) Of course information may sometimes be "occult", as in
Conspiracy Theory. Information may be "disinformation". Spies
and propagandists make up a kind of shadow "information economy",
to be sure. Hackers who believe in "freedom of information" have
my sympathy, especially since they've been picked as the latest
enemies of the Spectacular State, and subjected to its spasms of
control-by-terror. But hackers have yet to "liberate" a single
bit of information useful in our struggle. Their
impotence, and their fascination with Imagery, make them ideal
victims of the "Information State", which itself is based on pure
simulation. One needn't steal data from the
post-military-industrial complex to know, in general, what
it's up to. We understand enough to form our critique. More
information by itself will never take the place of the
actions we have failed to carry out; data by itself will
never reach critical mass. Dispite my loving debt to thinkers
like Robert Anton Wilson and T. Leary I cannot agree with their
optimist analysis of the cognitive function of information
technology. It is not the neural system alone which will achieve
autonomy, but the entire body.

9) Indeed, the whole "poetic terrorism" project has been proposed
only as a strategy in this very war.

10) "The 'World' is 'one'" can be and has been used to justify a
totality, a metaphysical ordering of "reality" with a
"center" or "apex" : one God, one King, etc., etc. This is the
monism of orthodoxy, which naturally opposes Dualism and its
other source of power ("evil") -- orthodoxy also
presupposes that the One occupies a higher ontological position
than the Many, that transcendence takes precedence over
immanence. What I call radical (or heretical) monism demands
unity of one and Many on the level of immanence; hence it is seen
by Orthodoxy as a turning-upside-down or saturnalia which
proposes that every "one" is equally "divine". Radical monism is
"on the side of" the Many -- which explains why it seems to lie
at the heart of pagan polytheism and shamanism, as well as
extreme forms of monotheism such as Ismailism or Ranterism, based
on "inner light" teachings. "All is one", therefore, can be
spoken by any kind of monist or anti-dualist and can mean many
different things.

11) A proposal: the new theory of taoist dialectics. Think
of the yin/yang disc, with a spot of black in the white lozenge,
and vice versa -- separated not by a straight line but an
S-curve. Amiri Baraka says that dialectics is just "separating
out the good from the bad" -- but the taoist is "beyond good and
evil". The dialectic is supple, but the taoist dialectic
is downright sinuous. For example, making use of the taoist
dialectic, we can re-evaluate Gnosis once again. True, it
presents a negative view of the body and of becoming. But also
true that it has played the role of the eternal rebel against all
orthodoxy , and this makes it interesting. In its
libertine and revolutionary manifestations the Gnosis possesses
many secrets, some of which are actually worth knowing.. The
organizational forms of Gnosis -- the crackpot cult, the secret
society -- seem pregnant with possibilities for the
TAZ/Immediatist project. Of course, as I've pointed out
elsewhere, not all gnosis is Dualistic. There also exists a
monist gnostic tradition, which sometimes borrows heavily from
Dualism and is often confused with it. Monist gnosis is
anti-eschatological, using religious language to describe
this world, not Heaven or the Gnostic Pleroma. Shamanism,
certain "crazy" forms of Taoism and Tantra and Zen, heterodox
sufism and Ismailism, Christian antinomians such as the Ranters,
etc. -- share a conviction of the holiness of the "inner spirit",
and of the actually real, the "world". These are our "spiritual
ancestors."